Andover.Net Updates Slashdot and Freshmeat
ACTON, Mass.––September 13, 1999–– Andover.Net (www.andover.net), the Internet’s leading Linux destination, today announced it has completed extensive hardware upgrades to its influential Slashdot (www.slashdot.org) and Freshmeat (www.freshmeat.net) news and resource sites. With a major investment in the IT infrastructure of both sites, Slashdot and Freshmeat can now serve the growing Linux community, without delay, the same news and information that has made these sites the most popular destination for Linux news and information.In keeping with the fundamental principles of the open source community, on Tuesday, August 31, Slashdot founder Rob “CmdrTaco” Malda opened up the beta testing of his newly upgraded site for a test drive to see if it could stand up to its readers’ demands. Malda invited his millions of readers to continually access and post responses to test the functionality and scalability of Slashdot. The site came through with flying colors processing a record five million hits, and thousands of postings, in two days with no major difficulties.
“It’s pretty wild having this much metal running Slashdot, but after last week I’m confident that we have what it takes to handle our massive growth. Plus people have stopped e-mailing me to complain that the server is slow. The new hardware means a bigger, better and faster Slashdot. And it goes well with chicken.”
As a result of the upgrade, Slashdot has expanded from three servers to six servers, enabling the site to keep up with the thousands of postings its readers submit each day. With the new servers Slashdot now has the power to serve 35 pages and 30 megabits of information per second—a major improvement over its previous 12 pages and 10 megabits per second. The upgrade also gives the site new elements of scalability with a load-balancing switch to distribute traffic between its servers. Now Andover.Net site administrators can monitor the flow of traffic and expand Slashdot’s capacity within an hour, ensuring that all readers have a chance to voice their opinions.
Freshmeat.net’s site also benefited from the expansion, adding three new servers to its infrastructure. These servers are load balanced as well, ensuring that as the traffic through the site continues to increase, the increased number of visitors will be easily accommodated. “Since acquiring Slashdot and Freshmeat, Andover.Net has been committed to expanding and improving the infrastructure of both sites so we can better serve the open source community,” said Bruce Twickler, president and CEO of Andover.Net. “With this upgrade we are happy to provide the community with better access to important industry news and information than ever before.”